Family Fun Friday

We have been searching for some more meaningful activities to do during our family time.  Don't get me wrong we all love playing Wii and other games together and there is nothing wrong with that but we were wanting to include some worship time as well.  Kirk Weaver's Family Time Activity Books seem to be the answer. 

Visit http://www.biblicalparenting.org/familytime.asp for more info.  These are great books and the website has some wonderful resources.  We currently have Bubbles, Balloons and Chocolate and Playing for Keeps.  Our goal with family worship is to obviously do it ourselves on a regular basis but then also come alongside and equip other families in our church to do the same.  We currently do not have a youth group and Jay is in charge in this area and we don't want a regular segregated youth group.  We want to create families that do stuff together.  We have seen many models and are trying to flesh out what it will look like.

Okay I digressed....back to our family night.  We made home made pizza and then when we were finished we sang a couple of songs together.  We are trying to teach the kids some of the songs we sing regulary in church together so they know the words and can get excited to sing along.

Natasha enjoying her pizza!

Anastasia is coming right along on her playing!

Then our activity was based on Good and Bad words.  There were several scripture verese we talked about:  Proverbs 12:18, Proverbs 25:18, Proverbs 15:4, and 1 Thessalonians 5:11.  The kids need to memorize part of 1 Thess.  is is : Encourage one another; build each other up.

Before we started reading I had the kids pick numbers and who ever got the closest was the one who I would trace for this activity.  (Everyone got to participate but we didn't need four outlines haging on the wall)  Joshua won so I traced his body and hung it on the wall:

 

After going over the verses we told the kids we were going to see how words can build people up and how they can tear people down.  I had slips of paper and the kids called out words to me that build people up such as:  I like you, Thank you, I will be your friend, let's play etc.  Then we listed words that tear down such as: ugly, stupid, your mean, I don't want to play with you, idiot etc.

I put the seperated slips of paper in a bowl.  (Use the tearing down words first)  They took turns picking one out and said what type of word it was.  Each time they said a tearing down word they tore a piece of the paper body off. 

 

 

 

Then they picked building up words from the other bowl and as they said nice words we taped the guy back together. 

 

Of course you can still see the scars (what a great object lesson).  We really need to be careful what we say because we can build someone up but the bad words can still leave scars.  When we were done taping him back together we all went around and had to say something nice about each person in our family.  We are going to do that all week at dinner.  We are also pointing out good and bad words more specifically this week and working on just using building up words.

What a great first activity of this type.  Stay tuned this week to see what is next.  We will have our family night on Thursday this week.